


city lights lay out before us

by greatunironic



Series: starting from zero, got nothing to lose [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Relationships, background & cameo characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:26:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24984547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic
Summary: Plo muttered, “Whatdidn’tObi-Wan do?” “Teenage fight club,” offered Anakin.(a fast + furious au snippet)
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Mace Windu, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Series: starting from zero, got nothing to lose [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848370
Comments: 22
Kudos: 202





	city lights lay out before us

Anakin was running late. This was not unusual, as he had what Windu often referred to as a pliable relationship with time.

This particular morning, he’d slept through his alarm and Obi-Wan had decided to let him suffer the consequences of it, rather than shake him awake and drag him to the shop with him. Or, sure, okay, perhaps more accurately, his alarm had gone off and Anakin, half-awake and bleary, had pawed at it, hitting snooze and subsequently knocking it down and burying it beneath a pile of dirty laundry; and Obi-Wan had tried to come get him up but Anakin had pulled a pillow over his head and snored loudly until Obi-Wan gave up and left without him.

Then, when he’d woken up fully and realized both the time and that he’d been truly abandoned by his pseudo-foster brother, he’d thrown on some clothes and then gone digging for his phone, only to find that he had a text from Padmé lamenting a flat tire on her beloved, ancient little Chevette that Anakin was fixing up for her in his spare time. 

Obviously, he’d thought, tucking his phone in his back pocket and grabbing his keys, this could not stand.

“I was just venting,” Padmé had said with a fond roll of her eyes when Anakin, patch kit in hand, showed up outside the little closet the UCLA Law TA’s all shared as an office. “It wasn’t a call for help, Ani. You didn’t need to come all the way over to Westwood before work to change it for me. I’m fully capable of calling Triple A.”

“First of all, how dare you,” Anakin had said.

One of the other TA’s, Sabé, snorted. She’d put down the coffee that she was practically inhaling and had begun to leer good-naturedly at him. “Oh but, Padmé, you’re going to deprive us of watching those muscles at work?”

“Yes,” she’d said. “Yes, I am.”

“This is my job,” Anakin had argued. “I don’t want to have you pay for Triple A — _ugh_ , I can’t believe you made me say it — when I’m right here.”

“I will,” Padmé said, “when you being right here is actually an hour drive out of your way from Venice.”

“Listen,” he’d said. “I didn’t want to pull this card, because I love you and respect you, but I will tell Obi-Wan you used Triple A.”

She had narrowed her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Sabé, behind them, had chortled.

“He’ll call you, with that sad, posh voice of his,” Anakin said, “and he’ll tell you how disappointed he is that you wouldn’t reach out to one of us to help you. And then he’ll insist that you take your car in to us this weekend so he can check to make sure they didn’t damage anything. And he’ll have me actually do the check, just so he can stare at you, with those eyes, the entire time.”

Padmé threw her hands up. “Fine!”

“Also,” Sabé had said, returning to her coffee, “he’s already here. Were you just going to call Triple A to prove a point?”

Head held high, Padmé had grabbed Anakin by the hand, dragged him out of the office and to the garage, and ignored Sabé. Anakin had winked at her over his shoulder and she’d saluted him with her truly disturbingly large travel mug.

He’d patched the tire while Padmé had popped over to Jimmy’s to pick up a coffee for Anakin, since he’d rushed out of his apartment without making his own. Padmé had put the little paper cup on the hood when she’d gotten back and leaned against her Chevette while watching him reinflate the patched flat.

After, he’d walked her back to her little office, listening to her complain good-naturedly about the pre-Law’s she was going to spend her morning with, before kissing her on the cheek and leaving her and Sabé to their office hours.

The drive back to Venice was, predictably, a fucking nightmare: the 405 was on its bullshit, having never left it in the first place, and then when he tried to hop off and take surface streets the rest of the way, Venice Boulevard was somehow even worse. Even a goddamn beaut of a car like Anakin’s Nissan Skyline couldn’t magically make LA’s stop and go traffic disappear.

With two typically Obi-Wan-esque texts glaring at him from his phone — how the man could instill such aggressive disappointment in phrases such as _Anakin dear_ and _at what time should we expect you today_ , he would never know — Anakin was practically speed walking from his parking spot to the front door of Windu’s Café and Autobody.

Somehow, though, he lucked out and got a nearly empty café to walk into, with Māhoe at the counter, chatting with Plo, who was making a BLT.

“Have I missed Obi-Wan shooting you down today?” asked Anakin in greeting.

Behind his ever present welding goggles, Plo rolled his eyes but Māhoe leaned back in his seat, practically filling the narrow path back to the shop as he tipped backwards. He said, pleasant, “It’s only noon, kid, plenty of time for me to try again.”

Anakin snorted. “You need different hobbies, man.”

Māhoe shrugged. Anakin wasn’t sure how he managed it and kept the chair on two legs.

Since Māhoe had shown up at the shop two months ago looking for work, cut loose when Yoda decided to finally make good on his threats to sell Temple Mechanics and retire to the overgrown vineyard the old man had won in some race back in the seventies, it had become a daily source of amusement to all who worked at Windu’s Café and Autobody to watch Māhoe make a pass at Obi-Wan, and subsequently crash and burn harder than any actual crash Anakin had ever seen at a battle.

Obi-Wan, for all the rumors and flirting, was notoriously oblivious to people hitting on him. Anakin had personally watched flag girls and boys alike bat their lashes at him, sidle in close, and ask him to take them home from a meet on the back of his Thunderbird, only to overhear them at the next one whispering, baffled, to their friends that he literally drove them home and then rode off into the night.

“I can’t believe you’re about that stick in the mud,” Anakin said, hopping up on the counter.

Plo hit him in the back with a dishcloth. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“This is my work,” he said, “the work of a little brother, and I will do this shit for free until I die. Anyway, Māhoe, what’s up with that? I mean, you’re _you.”_

Māhoe wasn’t exactly the usual type that went for Obi-Wan — granted, most people tripped over themselves the first time they saw him, as once you got past the elbow patches and grease stains, Anakin could admit that Obi-Wan was objectively movie star handsome. But usually after he let loose that razor-sharp wit and condescension on someone, they decided he wasn’t worth the effort. Māhoe, tattooed, mean, and possessed of a temper that rivaled Anakin’s own, was somehow in it to win it.

“Have you looked at him?” asked Māhoe with a crooked smile.

“Yeah, man, he looks like someone’s sad grandpa, keep your kinks to yourself.”

“What can I say, kid?” he asked. “I like a stuffy asshole.”

“Well, you’ve found their king,” Anakin said. 

“I wouldn’t call him stuffy,” offered Plo. “Reserved, is a better word.”

“Repressed, more like,” he said. “But yeah. Stuffy’s not the word I’d use to describe a teenage felon.”

“I’m sorry,” said Māhoe, “a teenage what?”

“Teenage felon,” Anakin said brightly.

Plo sighed loudly. Anakin looked at him and he frowned, sort of tipping his hand back and forth, as if to say, _Now, we don’t actually_ know _if he was a teenage felon._ He said, “He had a misspent youth.”

He leaned down close to Māhoe. “Couple years ago, I kinda, sort of stumbled onto some sealed juvie records with Obi-Wan’s name on them.”

“Why?” asked Plo, with the sort of long-suffering tone that everyone over the age of twenty-five tended to adopt with Anakin.

“I was bored,” he said. He’d also just met Padmé and was trying to impress her — the particulars of that brilliant plan escaped him now, but at the time he’d felt like a genius. 

He was so lucky Padmé thought he was pretty, he thought.

Māhoe had an odd look on his face. Anakin couldn’t make heads or tails of it — something concerned and questioning and almost fond, emotions Anakin was pretty sure he had never seen on somebody’s face, at least in that combination, before. He asked, “What’d he do?”

Anakin scratched the back of his neck. “What, Obi-Wan?”

He nodded.

Plo muttered, “What _didn’t_ Obi-Wan do?”

“Teenage fight club,” offered Anakin.

Māhoe’s face cleared and his eyebrows shot up towards his hairline so fast they practically achieved lift-off, and Plo angled another set of rolled eyes in Anakin’s direction. He raised his hands defensively.

“Hey! That’s what Vos told me.”

“And what have we said about believing the words that come out of Quinlan Vos’s mouth? Anyway, it wasn’t actually a fight club,” said Plo after a moment. “At least, I don’t think there were members, such as it was.”

Māhoe looked back and forth between the two of them for a moment. His eyebrows had settled back down but that strange look returned.

“Doesn’t seem the type,” he said carefully.

Anakin shrugged. He’d never seen Obi-Wan fight. He didn’t do it anymore — hadn’t, everyone said, since Anakin was nine and Watto had put Mom’s contract up as part of the prize in a race and the guy who lost to Windu hadn’t taken too kindly to it. Back then, he’d been told he was too young to go to those kinds of things, even if he did sneak out to them now and then, but he hadn’t been at that particular one; and to hear other people tell it, one thing lead to another and Obi-Wan had almost killed him, beat the guy, Maul or something, so bad it put him in a medically induced coma while he’d — not so much walked away, Anakin guessed, remembering vaguely the aftermath and him and Mom running into Windu at the clinic, Windu at the bedside of twenty-two year old Obi-Wan, two black eyes, a concussion, and a bunch of broken ribs — 

But it was something, everyone said, he used to do a lot, after he’d turned up on the doorstep to Mace Windu’s shop, fifteen and too skinny with scraped knuckles and a chip on his shoulder as sharp as his British accent but a genius with an engine. He, Vos, and Fisto had apparently used to get into all sorts of trouble back then, and as much as Vos liked to say Obi-Wan had been, and still was, ten pounds of feral in a five pound bag, Anakin couldn’t put those two people together: the Obi-Wan who used to beat the shit out of people for fun and profit as a teenager, and the Obi-Wan who wore his glasses on a chain and had sweater vests on under his coveralls, who just smiled in blank bemusement when Māhoe hit on him.

He’d only ever known that Obi-Wan, it felt like, the one with the nice church manners and soft, condescending voice. Mom started work at the autobody almost immediately after that race, but Anakin wasn’t allowed until a few years later, after Mom got sick and sending him to the shop was the only way to keep him off the streets; and by that time Obi-Wan was just one of Windu’s mechanics, maybe the best one, and he was kind and a bit annoying, always told Anakin to be mindful of his emotions, never swore, sanctimonious on a good day, and sure, sometimes he was sarcastic and mean — especially to Vos — but the other Obi-Wan that supposedly existed, just underneath the one Anakin knew?

Some days, Anakin would think that the whole story — the race, him and Mom, the fight — if he hadn’t lived it, hadn’t gone to the clinic that day and seen that red-headed young man with the four broken ribs in the hospital bed, if he hadn’t gone looking for those sealed juvie records years later — he’d think the whole story was just that: a story.

 _Doesn’t seem the type,_ indeed.

“Yeah, well, who really even knows?” asked Anakin. “We all know Obi-Wan Kenobi won’t say shit even if we ask, so. Teenage fight club it is.”

Māhoe made a thoughtful noise, dragging his thumb across his lip.

Plo hit Anakin in the back again with the dish towel.

“Ow!” He turned, betrayed, to Plo. He’d really put some snap into that one.

“Get off my counter,” he said, “and stop gossiping. You’re two hours late as it is — you’re lucky Mace dragged Obi-Wan into the office when he got here a little while ago, or you’d have both of them coming after you right now.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Anakin muttered. The only thing worse than Obi-Wan when Anakin was late was Mace Windu in a snit about something — which he just had to be, if he’d only just gotten to the shop himself and his first act of the day was to drag Obi-Wan into the office to talk about something.

“Yep,” said Plo. “So I’d get to work if I were you, and pretend you’ve been here while you’re at it.”

Māhoe knocked his elbow into Anakin’s thigh. He said, “I just brought in a ‘03 Civic that needs some fixing up. Collateral from a battle the other night, for Windu. How about I’ll tell ‘em you were with me getting it, forgot to let them know?”

He eyed Māhoe. “What’s in it for you?”

“Help me with the Civic,” he said, “and owe me a favor or two.”

Anakin’s ambient suspicion levels ratcheted up. “Are you trying to do a _10 Things I Hate About You_ thing with me with a car right now?”

Māhoe smiled. It was not a very nice smile. “We’ll talk terms later.”

He hopped off the counter and walked into the shop, glancing back at Māhoe twice as he went. It didn’t seem like a bad deal, so what the hell, he figured. The worst that would happen is Māhoe would probably pump him for more Obi-Wan gossip — Anakin had plenty, and some of it was even verified — and then still totally fall on his face while trying to get into Obi-Wan’s pants. It’d be hilarious, probably — truly, a win-win for Anakin.

Once inside the shop, Anakin said hi to Fisto, the only guy who wasn’t actively underneath a car, and went to get his coveralls on. Their little locker room was right next to Windu’s office, so Anakin tried to be as quiet as possible to avoid drawing attention to himself.

Zipping himself up, he glanced around the door frame of the locker room and looked into the glass windows of the office. The blinds were half shut, and Windu and Obi-Wan were just inside, Windu perched on the edge of his desk and Obi-Wan sat in a loose limbed sprawl in the one visitor chair, a wholly painful wooden thing that was no doubt purchased to encourage people to leave as quickly as possible. Obi-Wan was the only person who could stand it; it was probably because he’d been some sort of penitent monk in a past life, Anakin figured, or that he really was a robot that Windu had put together years ago, with a NOS heart and patrician manners.

Anakin couldn’t quite hear them but he knew the look on Windu’s face. He’d been confronted with it quite a bit as a teenager, sneaking in late from meets he shouldn't have been at but went to anyway, and he’d grown used to the quiet anger Windu had worn and only now, a little bit older and slightly more wiser, Anakin could also recognize another emotion in it: worry.

Obi-Wan was frowning as he listened to whatever Windu was saying, occasionally lifting his hand to run the back of it underneath his chin, an adaptation of his thoughtful beard stroke for when he had grease and oil on his hands.

Anakin, genetically unable to leave well enough alone, moved quietly out of the locker room and positioned himself in the shadows, lingering near the open door.

“— even saw one of Dooku’s newest the other day,” Windu was saying. Anakin stiffened at the name. Dooku was one of LAPD’s assistant chiefs, one who was constantly angling to get himself all the way to the top. He’d been undercover back in the day, had ties to Yoda and Temple because of it, had broken the old man’s heart when it had come out, and there were still rumors that he was somehow involved in the scene.

Windu, who had learned at Yoda’s knee himself and had always had legit beef with the LAPD, hated Dooku. Obi-Wan and Anakin had inherited the distaste.

Nothing good, Anakin knew, could come of Dooku and his cronies sniffing around the shop.

He inched a little closer.

Windu unfolded a newspaper next to his hip and handed it to Obi-Wan, whose eyes darted over the page Windu had opened it to as Windu spoke.

“I don’t know who yet — maybe someone over at Republic,” he said, “or probably Empire — said something to someone about us, and now they’ve got eyes on us for these heists, that we might know something.”

There were lots of reasons why other garages and shops would want to throw another one under the bus with the cops: trying to keep heat off themselves, trying to get rid of the stiffer competition, even just petty revenge, plain and simple — there were decades of rivalries between the shops in and around LA who catered towards the street racing community. Especially against the ones, Anakin thought, that had mechanics like Obi-Wan and racers with pedigrees like Windu and Anakin himself.

Obi-Wan folded the newspaper over. “Well, we’ve clearly not done anything. We’ll want to keep a low profile for a bit at meets, I suppose, and I will try to get it through Anakin’s head that he shouldn’t be going out every other night.”

Windu nodded, but that angry worry on his face had gone a bit far-away. He looked down at Obi-Wan and for the first time in his entire goddamn life, Anakin watched Mace Windu hesitate before he spoke.

 _What the fuck,_ thought Anakin, eyes wide.

“Ben,” he said, and oh, shit, yes, things had fully, totally gone off the rails if Windu was using _that_ nickname.

Obi-Wan narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

“The heists, in the papers,” he said, slowly. “They didn’t put in how they happened, not all the details, that is.”

“And you know them?”

Windu nodded. “Friend of a friend who works at a cop bar downtown. Three Honda Civics, modified, identical, the last one out on 15 just outside Primm —”

Obi-Wan’s back had gone perfectly straight.

“Excuse me,” he said. His voice was cool, tightly controlled. Anakin had never heard him speak like that before.

“I know,” said Windu. “I know.”

“I haven’t,” Obi-Wan said.

“I know,” he said again. “I know you wouldn’t. I know you haven’t. It’s only that it is an extremely specific set of circumstances.”

“You,” he said in that cool, distant voice, “are the only person that I have ever spoken to — about that plan, in the desert.”

“Okay,” said Windu. “Okay, I know, I just —”

“You had to be sure,” he said. 

Windu nodded. “I did. I'm sorry.”

“I know.” Obi-Wan sat back in the chair again, deliberately relaxing himself. “I know you’re sorry. Thank you.”

Anakin leaned back against the wall. He could feel his heart beating quickly in his chest, rabbit-fast.

Five years ago, when Mom had been dead for six months and Anakin was chafing under Windu’s dictatorial rule as he lived out of Depa’s old room, Obi-Wan got side-swiped in traffic by a drunk and ended up with a dislocated shoulder, a broken wrist, three snapped fingers, and a seriously painful case of road rash. Same as with Depa’s old things that surrounded Anakin at night, Windu had never boxed up any of Obi-Wan’s stuff after he moved out at eighteen, and had insisted that he come back home to recover. One night, when Obi-Wan was strung out on too many painkillers, Anakin had sat on the staircase leading to the attic and listened as Windu tried to put Obi-Wan to bed and he’d blearily outlined a heist plan using three identical cars and a deserted stretch of road passing through the Mojave.

Anakin, sixteen and angry and grieving and desperate for attention and affection, had ended up at Palpatine’s garage the next day, as he always did to outrun Windu’s heavy-handed care, and got stoned with a couple of the mechanics out back. Later, when Palpatine had inquired after Anakin’s well-being in that grandfatherly way of his, he’d boasted of a genius plan and passed Obi-Wan’s heist idea off as his own. Palpatine had smiled warmly and said, “Maybe when you’re older, young Skywalker.”

He’d stopped going around to Palpatine’s garage maybe a year later, when Windu had found out and blown a gasket and he and Anakin had perhaps the worst screaming fight they’d ever had. Windu had stormed out of the shop, slamming a door so hard behind himself that it broke, and Anakin had barricaded himself under a car. Two hours later, Obi-Wan, forever the apologist of Mace Windu’s faults, had shown up. Another hour after that, silently handing Anakin tools without him having to ask, Obi-Wan had said in his quiet, posh voice, “Maul worked for Palpatine, you know, when we were younger. He only stopped after a race he lost — Palpatine ended his employment, after, I’m told. Unhappy to lose the purse, I suppose.”

Anakin may not have been the greatest when it came to reading people, but he wasn’t bad at connecting dots when they were laid out cleanly for him. He knew what race it must’ve been, and what was in the purse for that race, what Windu had won. What Maul had tried to do, before Obi-Wan had ended it. Anakin stopped hanging around Palpatine after that.

He thought back to that day, Obi-Wan cross-legged on the floor and passing him tools, and Palpatine’s too kind smiles over the years. He bit the edge of this thumb, thinking.

“Maybe when you’re older, young Skywalker,” he’d said and, after a moment, he‘d added, “Perhaps then we can put that fine plan of yours into practice.”

 _Oh,_ Anakin thought. _Oh, shit, I’ve fucked up._

**Author's Note:**

> \- just some unbeta’d nonsense, because isolation is apparently worse for encouraging my bullroar than the santa ana’s coming to town, and i could write probably 20k more of this, so if anyone would like to encourage it or even audience it, hit me up in the comments or on my extremely disused tumblr [ here](https://greatunironic.tumblr.com/)   
>  \- title from tracy chapman’s “fast car”


End file.
